Now, whatever other conditions such a body will satisfy, we may be sure that it will not be made up of members elected by single-member constituencies.  A single-member constituency must necessarily contain a minority, and may even contain a majority of dissatisfied persons whose representation is, as it were, blotted out by the successful candidate.  Three single-member constituencies which might all return members of the same colour, if they were lumped together to return three members would probably return two of one colour and one of another.  There would still, however, be a suppressed minority averse to both these colours, or desiring different shades of those colours from those afforded them in the constituency.  Other things being equal, it may be laid down that the larger the constituency and the more numerous its representatives, the greater the chance of all varieties of thought and opinion being represented.

But that is only a preliminary statement; it still leaves untouched all the considerations advanced in the former part of this discussion to show how easily the complications and difficulties of voting lead to a falsification of the popular will and understanding.  But here we enter a region where a really scientific investigation has been made, and where established results are available.  A method of election was worked out by Hare in the middle of the last century that really does seem to avoid or mitigate nearly every falsifying or debilitating possibility in elections; it was enthusiastically supported by J.S.  Mill; it is now advocated by a special society—­the Proportional Representation Society—­to which belong men of the most diverse type of distinction, united only by the common desire to see representative government a reality and not a disastrous sham.  It is a method which does render impossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies, and nearly every trick for rigging results that now distorts and cripples the political life of the modern world.  It exacts only one condition, a difficult but not an impossible condition, and that is the honest scrutiny and counting of the votes.

The peculiar invention of the system is what is called the single transferable vote—­that is to say, a vote which may be given in the first instance to one candidate, but which, in the event of his already having a sufficient quota of votes to return him, may be transferred to another.  The voter marks clearly in the list of the candidates the order of his preference by placing 1, 2, 3, and so forth against the names.  In the subsequent counting the voting papers are first classified according to the first votes.  Let us suppose that popular person A is found to have received first votes enormously in excess of what is needed to return him.  The second votes are then counted on his papers, and after the number of votes necessary to return him has been deducted, the surplus votes are divided in due proportion among the second